Digger talked to
Martin Fillery who has created a big business based around Big Boys
Toys called... BigBoysToys.com
Digger:
You clearly have some amazingly fab and cool retro items on there
such as Daleks, Jim'll Fix It chairs (I always wanted one of those)
and Batmobiles. How authentic are these pieces and do they work?
Martin: Well, typically replicas are what I would have. It’s very
difficult, and very costly, to own a real Batmobile. We’re talking
several hundreds of thousands. But then even with a replica you can
be talking £100,000. So if I’m going to have one I think I’ll
go for the replica. But I also do collect authentic pieces of the
things I can afford, so for example the Jim’ll Fix It chair, which
nobody would bother to replicate, because it’s nowhere near as
exciting. Yes I own that original. I also own a
Batmobile but it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, it’s just
an amazing thing.
1960s
Batmobile
1989
Batmobile
Digger: So Jim’s bottom has been on your chair?
Martin: Yes.
Digger: And remnants of cigar ash in the in-built ashtray?
Martin: Yes. I’m glad you didn’t say something else then. (Both
laugh)
Digger: I wonder what happened to Jimmy. He seemed to go out of
fashion.
Martin: He did actually get a follow-up series on one of the extra,
lesser channels called Jim’ll Fix It Now and Then or something
like that. Catching up with people who’d grown up but also doing
some new ‘fix its’ too.
Jim
Fixed It For Martin - the famous chair
Jet-powered
Sinclair C5 Martin has for sale
Digger: How big a market is there for Big
Boys Toys - is this
people of a certain age recapturing their youth now they can afford
to own these cult treasures?
Martin: Yes, I mean the great thing is that if we’re talking a
1989 Batmobile, we’re talking someone with an awful lot of money.
But you could equally be looking at someone who is only in their twenties
because they saw the movies as a small child and now they own a
football team! For instance, footballers are young and they would be
the sort of person who is very likely to want, and who would be able to afford, a 1989
Batmobile.
Digger: You have customers like that?
Martin: Yes. Also, with the 1966 Batmobile, obviously you think it
might be someone of a certain age who is interested. But the great
thing there is that because it was so many years ago you’ve
got various customers. Possibly someone who is, dare I say it, bloody old and he was not even a
child at that time 40 years ago but absolutely loved that car because you can’t
help loving the 1966 Batmobile with the glass bubble dome and the
flames from the exhaust. But also that programme was in syndication
all around the world for thirty years and can even be seen today
regularly on one channel over here. So that that’s just amazing
and because these things are on screen a lot and on DVD, there’s
an aspirational market for them. I don’t know why I’m harping on
about Batman, but, of course, Batman is a subject that keeps coming
back and people continue to like. If Daleks are your thing then
you’ve got a programme that started in the sixties and, just like
the Batmobile, any age group might be interested. You’d be amazed – I’ve had
people in their seventies who’ve asked me for a Dalek and they buy
one. But equally you can have someone in their twenties or even as I
had someone buying a Dalek for his five year-old son. A fully drivable
£4,000 Dalek that you could sit inside and wear a headset and talk
where a voice came out like a ‘real’ Dalek and drive around and
the guns worked. For a five year old. For the modern generation, the
series is back on now and a whole new generation is interested.
Digger: Plus it’s being shown more overseas now because of the
higher production values.
Out
with the old... David Tennant and Matt Smith
Martin: Yes, it’s big in America now.
Digger: In the old days, 99.9% of Americans wouldn’t know what a
Dalek is but now more do. So, in these recessionary times, are these
items a solid investment like a lot of memorabilia seems to be?
Martin: Yes, absolutely. I myself recently won four auctions at
Bonhams – the highly anticipated Dr Who auction there, where the
BBC themselves were auctioning off original items from the old
series and from the new series. Obviously there it’s not just like
a themed auction where some Dr Who items come up and some Star Wars
items come up and so on. And with those sorts of auctions you wonder if the items are genuine
and even if the person selling is genuine and you don’t know who
the source was really. “It was given to me by the man who used to
do the gardening for my mum and he said he worked on the programme
once.” That’s not enough when you’re
spending the kind of money where a Dalek recently sold at Bonhams
for £20,400 plus VAT. That was phenomenal and this one wasn’t
even from a beloved time in Dr Who, not wishing to offend any Who fans
from 1988. If we were talking Tom Baker, a man who did that role for
six years and who people tend to see as the definitive Dr Who,
somewhat similarly to the way they view Sean Connery as the
definitive
James Bond to most people, the Dalek would probably have gone for a
lot, lot more. Having said that, David Tennant did a very good job.
And a helluva lot of people will now consider him as THE Dr Who. And
now there’s the new guy...
Famous
shot of Daleks on Westminster Bridge
Tom
Baker posing with friends
Digger: He comes from Northampton. We have a lot of celebs from
here these days, including Alan Carr.
Martin: Yes. You’re churning them out, aren’t you?
Digger: What is the most unusual item you have been asked to
source or to provide?
Martin: That’s really difficult. I think the most unusual thing
has been for me for myself. People haven’t asked for anything over
and above the call of duty. I buy things that are unusual. I
currently own a full-sized telephone. Now you might think that’s
not too dramatic.
Digger: What, a K6?
Martin: No, I don’t mean an old telephone kiosk. No, think the
little red phone off the Direct Line advert and I have a full-size
replica of one of those cars. It is 16 feet long. The handset on top
is 14 feet wide.
Digger: Can you drive it?
Direct
Line phone
Martin: Yes you can drive the phone car. It takes six men to pick up
the handset if it calls and it's being made to make calls as well by
the way! It’s fully drivable and
there’s no windscreen. You sit in complete darkness and you have
three LCD screens, one left, one right and one at the front and a
button beneath you that when pressed it shows behind you.
Digger: Will we be seeing you in it on the M1?
Martin: There’s doubts as to how legal it is to drive on the road.
A few people have said I’ve managed to create a loophole with
this, not a wormhole and I won’t be travelling through time and
space with this. But a loophole in the sense that, at the last
minute, I opted to put an electric vehicle a bit like a milk float
inside to avoid…
Digger: Fumes?
Martin: Exactly. So I bought a very powerful electric vehicle. If
you think about it, when it first starts its round a milk float
carries enormous weights as bottles of milk are very heavy. As it
happens, I managed to source this vehicle for £250 on eBay. It
looked a bit like a small milk float and it had been used to carry
around sheet metal in a warehouse. It’s powered by twenty
batteries and it can take the weight of this giant telephone and the
handset and I can’t believe it drives along as if it’s not
carrying any weight. The phone was made for a Mariah Carey video –
the song was called Get Your Number and the video is on YouTube.
Originally it was a big red phone and Mariah Carey is laying on the
handset and then later in the video she’s dancing on top of the
phone – God knows how high up she is. And it came up for sale and
no Mariah Carey fans were going to buy it, something you can’t fit
anywhere. And initially it was too big and I couldn’t make a
replica of the Direct Line phone if I left it at its original size
as it would be a wide load when I drove it around. I didn’t want a
police escort for it. Because it had to be cut in half to ship it by
container from the USA which was 40 foot, I had it cut to size so
that it just fitted into the container along with a few smaller
items I was also shipping over in between.
Digger: It’s quite cheap to bring stuff over by container
these days.
Martin: Yes, so when it was put back together it was 8 foot wide and
it could be transported or driven. No MOT or windscreen or
windscreen wipers.
Digger: Is there anybody else doing what you do?
Martin: I don’t think there are and if there are I’d be pleased
to meet them.
A
Dalek dealing with the recent cold snap
Digger: Do you have any items related to The Prisoner which is, as
you know, being broadcast anew soon? I was thinking bubble
chairs, mini mokes, penny farthings and that unusual phone, for example.
Martin: No, I haven’t actually. I like the idea. I’ve been to
Portmerion and loved it. You could never be disappointed by it. Interestingly enough I suppose the interior of my home is
based around The Prisoner in that respect. Because I have ball
chairs, egg chairs, one of my TVs is a 28" highly collectable
Keracolor 1960's white Ball TV with a factory fitted 8 Track player on a
stand and I very much collect things that have domes because it was
a very sixties thing. Things that had Perspex domes on, so my hi-fi
is an old sixties one in mint condition with a Perspex dome and
several arcade machines with Perspex domes.
Digger: I had a fibre-optic lamp that had a round dome. Shame I
don’t still have it.
Martin: Yes, I had one too. I collect globe TVs from the sixties, so
I have a JVC Videosphere.
Digger: I remember - the orange one.
Martin: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking at. And another one
is a Phillips Discoverer which actually came out in the eighties and
was to do with the space shuttle Discovery. Same kind of thing,
shaped like an astronaut's helmet.
JVC
Videosphere
Digger: What items and articles are you aware of that are out there
that you are still seeking to make available?
Martin: There’s a difference between seeking to make available and
seeking to collect for myself. Seeking to make available, yeah
there’s an interesting one. There’s such a long list. Certainly
for myself I want to have this list of cars. A Knightrider Trans-Am,
a Back To The Future De Lorean which is something I have owned, a Dukes
Of Hazard Dodge Charger, a 1966 Batmobile as well as a 1989
Batmobile, a Streethawk motorbike, an Airwolf Helicopter –
recently one was up for sale in America but it didn’t sell
although I would have bought it. This one was just for looking at
because you were never going to fly it. If it were cheap enough I
would have had it to convert into a fully working simulator like the
helicopter on my website BigBoysToys.com. There’s a Robinson R22
Beta helicopter on there which you’ll see will actually lift off
from the ground six feet via a hydraulic ram and then move
around violently tilting left, right, forward and so on and spinning
360 degrees. There’s a virtual reality headset and all the
technology so when you sit inside you’re now inside an R22 and you
put the headset on and you’re in a virtual R22 provided by
Microsoft Flight Simulator X. That software has two helicopters that
come as standard and one of them was the one that I owned, I
couldn’t believe my luck!
Martin
and the Back To The Future car
Digger: You could replicate the Avengers episode where there’s
that Formula One fan (I think it was Arthur Lowe) who has a
simulator in his house. Because it was sixties ‘virtual
reality’, there’s just a screen ahead of the car to simulate the
racetrack and the film can go at different speeds and angles of the
track. And when the car makes an error you get varying degrees of
electric shock! You could do it a lot better.
Martin: Absolutely.
Knightrider
The
Dukes of Hazzard
Digger: How do you want to develop BigBoysToys.com?
Martin: I do see it as a brand name. I noticed recently Firebox, the
website that sells toys and gadgets. They don’t really sell the
same kinds of things as me – they would sell mass-produced things
and I sell pretty much one-offs. I can get you a Batmobile made but obviously
you’re talking a lot of money and only so many are going to be
made in a year. They would sell a Star Wars Stormtrooper suit which
is in very ready supply. Firebox have just started advertising on TV
and that’s something that I like the idea of. Because BigBoysToys.com is the be all and end all in domain names for the
kind of things I sell. There is nothing like that name. To have a globally
recognised phrase like Stitch In Time or Too Many Chefs, Big
Boys Toys
unbelievably describes exactly what I do. I haven't looked t
what Stitch In Time and Too Many Chefs might be, but I assume they
sell sewing accessories and cooking items. Whereas Big
Boys Toys
could sell you a £20 million yacht or a Concorde Aeroplane (a real
one) and stuff like that and that is something I’m very excited
about. There are no limits on what I can sell...
A
superyacht
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